Re: [Monotone-debian] Over-complicated debian/rules

[Zack Weinberg]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 6:10 PM, Stephen Leake
<address@hidden> wrote:
>>  Note in particular that 'dh', AFAIK, still does
>> not support the hacks that are necessary to prevent the manual from
>> getting built on the buildds (which in turn is what keeps monotone
>> transitions from getting entangled with TeXLive transitions, so we
>> *really* do not want to lose that).
>
> I don't follow. Why doesn't the manual build with current Debian
> Squeeze? It builds when I try it on my Debian Squeeze

The manual builds fine on a normal installation of Squeeze, yah.

It is, however, necessary to *prevent* the manual from being built
(and then thrown away) by Debian's buildd network when it rebuilds the
"monotone" package for all architectures.  Not because it wouldn't
work, but because to do so the source package would have to express a
Build-Depends (not to be confused with a Build-Depends-Indep) on TeX,
and that in turn would mean that during periods where TeX didn't work
correctly on some architectures, monotone could not transition to
testing, despite there being nothing wrong with monotone itself.
Hence the existing kludges in debian/rules to build the manual in the
binary-indep target and *not* in the build target; which dh does not
support AFAIK.

Yes, this situation is broken.  The cure is for Debian Policy to
mandate the "build-indep" and "build-arch" debian/rules targets so
that dpkg-buildpackage -B could call build-arch instead of build; once
that happened, dh would no doubt grow support for
build-arch/build-indep in short order.  However, for no comprehensible
reason, the Debian Policy maintainers have repeatedly refused to make
build-arch mandatory; instead they want a mechanism to reliably
*detect* whether there is a build-arch target.  As this is impossible
(it may in fact reduce to the Halting Problem, but at the very least
it would require modifications to Make that AFAIK nobody has even
attempted to code) we're stuck.  For at least six years now, probably
more like ten.

z "no, I'm not bitter in the least, why would you think any such thing?" w